Title:

Letter from C. H. Waddington to Francis Crick

Creator:

Waggington, C. H. (Conrad Hal), 1905-1975

Recipient:

Crick, Francis, 1916-2004

Date:

27 December 1967

Description:

Waddington's exchange with Crick came in response to a review by Waddington of Crick's book, Of Molecules and Men (1966), which argued against vitalism, the belief that living beings are animated by an autonomous soul or metaphysical inner force that cannot be explained by natural laws. In his letter Waddington gave more credence than Crick to the idea that by studying macromolecules and other complex biological systems, phenomena such as bonding would be observed that could not be accounted for by the current knowledge of physics, and whose explanation would require further development of theoretical physics (which was not to say that physics could not eventually explain these phenomena). Moreover, Waddington emphasized how far physics and chemistry were from giving explanations for the most complex of result of evolution, human consciousness.

Original Repository:

The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Francis Harry Compton Crick Papers

Location:

Box: 102. Folder: PP/CRI/I/2/6/5

Rights:

Reproduced with permission of C. J. Waddington.

Genre:

Letters (correspondence)

Subject:

Biology, Vitalism, and Macromolecular Substances

Format:

Text

Extent:

3 pages

Relation:

Letter from Francis Crick to C. H. Waddington, 1967

Language:

English

Legacy Source Citation:

Original Repository. Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Francis Harry Compton Crick Papers. 11646. URL. http://archives.wellcome.ac.uk/

Legacy ID:

SCBBLS

NLM ID:

101584582X159

Profiles Collection:

The Francis Crick Papers

Shareable Link:

https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/101584582X159

Story Section:

Embryology and the Organization of DNA in Higher Organisms, 1966-1976